The present invention relates to data warehousing, and in particular, to the integration of master data management in a data warehouse.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Referring to FIG. 4, a data warehouse 402 typically comprises a database 404 containing data that is received from various operating groups in an organization; e.g., marketing, production, sales, customer service, and so on. Typical application systems that the operating groups execute include applications such as PLM (product lifecycle management) 408a, CRM (customer relationship management) 408b, PPS (product production system) 408c, and so on. These applications typically generate the data (referred to as “transaction data”) that is to be stored in the data warehouse 402. For example, transaction data may be information relating to the sale of widgets: where the sale occurred, when the sale took place, the sale price, and so on. Transaction data may be information about the production of widgets: how many where produced at a given manufacturing site, information about the raw materials used to make the widgets and so on. Typically, the transaction data generated by the application systems 408a-408c are transformed by an ETL (extraction, transformation, load) process 406a and then loaded into the data warehouse 402.
Data marts 410 are sets of data that can be customized and otherwise targeted for a given group or used within the organization; e.g., business planning for a new product, customer servicing, development of a new manufacturing process, and so on. Data marts 410 may comprise a subset of the data stored in the data warehouse database 404 and may or may not include transformation by the ETL process 406a. Data marts 410 may comprise data collected from the various applications systems 408a-408c and typically involves transformation by the ETL process 406a. 
Another aspect of an organization is its master data. Master data provides a single, unified view of data that may be generated and/or referenced by the various operating groups and their respective application systems 408a-408c. Referring to FIG. 4, an MDM system 412 typically communicates with the other operational systems, for example, via an ETL layer 406b or by way of API (application programming interface) calls executed by their software applications 408a-408c. The management of such data, referred to as master data management (MDM) is a strategy/process for creating, managing and maintaining such data. An MDM strategy typically includes components like universal agreement on data definitions, data governance policies to guide the collection and management of data, enforcement of these standards, and technology to reconcile and standardize data from the various operative applications systems of the organization.